ddcharbon Reviews

To Catch a Killer (2023)

A Genre Transcending Film

[10/10 · 28 August 2023]

Ok. This movie is better than Seven and in its way, as good as Silence of the Lambs, though admittedly not nearly as blood curdling. It's at bottom a police procedural catch a serial killer flick, but it's so much better than these flicks ever are (think all those retreads of Morgan Friedman tracking down another psycho). First off, it hangs together as a smart police procedural. Second, Mendelssohn is awesome as an aging, dogged, brilliant-and gay-mentor of a damaged, talented beat cop who is the very essence of underachiever. The opening fifteen minutes are a masterpiece of sound and light portraying an eruption of precision and horrific violence in the midst of New Years Eve celebrations in Baltimore. Movies like this often have a predictable and disappointing third act; but not this flick. The killer's self-justifying monologue is original and compelling and events unfold in a manner you certainly won't predict. I suspect that the relatively low overall rating is a result of this movie being too smart for most of the people who thought they were settling in for yet another "Along Came A Spider". Their disappointment is a testament to the film's intelligence. If you like movies that are well shot, well acted, and stay a step ahead of you, you'll love this flick.

Tár (2022)

Bloated and shallow

[5/10 · 24 June 2023]

You might ask yourself why there's an accent above the "a" in Tar since the name is pronounced just like the black pitch you put on your roof that doesn't need an accent in English. Well, you can look the story up in Variety; but the truth is it's a shaggy dog tale long on pretense and short on purpose. As is this movie. The movie runs long and yet it wastes that long running time mostly on bloated scenes of little point--the interminable interview scene with Adam Gopnik playing himself (something those of us who enjoy his writings definitely could have done without) at the beginning eats up a lot of film while the complete dissolution of Tar's longtime lesbian relationship is accomplished in about 30 seconds of humdrum dialogue. Similarly, her final crack up takes place in one completely unbelievable scene of actual physical assault at the podium in front of the full orchestra and a full house, while her decline into conducting some cosplay orchestra in southeast Asia expands, like Bernstein's agonizingly molto adagio version of the slow movement of Mahler's Fifth he conducted at the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy and referenced by Tar in said interview, to fill, quite pointlessly, the last ten minutes of the film. Blanchette is thoroughly captivating but it's not clear to me that Field knows where he's going or has anything truly new to say about the abuse of power in the world of classical performance. The fact that he's willing to go for cheap tricks like Tar assaulting her replacement on the podium--something that despite the high profile falls from grace of figures like James Levine and Placido Domingo has never been closely approximated in the modern performance world--shows just how hard up he is for something definite to say about the world he's decided to anatomize. And the flicked finger at her apparently working class roots (another less than a minute scene in the final act) is something that is not earned nor woven into the fabric of Blanchette's performance or Field's direction. In short, I'm not convinced Field either understands or appreciates the world he's telling a story about, nor does he know for sure how he feels about his main character; the result is more muddled than meaningfully ambiguous. The gestures are either parodies of PBS or glancing cuffs from the me too/up yours generation. Why did Tar self-deconstruct? Was it her genius, her arrogance, her insecurity, her libido, or just something fundamentally suspicious about all those long hairs playing the music of white men now dead for centuries? Field doesn't seem to know, and neither, at the end of his long tangent, do we.

Horror in the High Desert (2021)

Only Good Until You Know It Isn't. . .

[6/10 · 5 May 2023]

So, I didn't realize this was of the "found footage" horror genre, so I had a bit of the Blair Witch Project experience with it. I did start to wonder during the final sequence because a. If it were real, I can't imagine they would show that kind of footage (it's like a snuff film, practically); b. The disfigured man looks like someone wearing Hollywood latex and make-up; and c. The final "cut" is far too aesthetically convenient--if this were real that would have been a lot more messy and noisy. The footage and interviews leading up to the final sequence are very believable--I didn't even question the veracity of the material during this part of the film. But I do think the film relies entirely on its gimmick. The BWP is effectively scary even when you know it's fiction, but if you knew this was fiction, then the interviews leading up to the last shots would be just tedious and soap opera-y. There isn't really an effective building of suspense. I mean, Jesus's feet aren't scary.

Summer of 84 (2018)

Will the Real Summer of 84 Please Stand Up?

[7/10 · 21 October 2021]

Summer of 84 (2018) feels almost like two movies-the first 90 minutes nods heavily towards 80s nostalgia and plays like a less well-paced version of Disturbia with Canadian teen actor Graham Verchere in the Shia LaBeouf role and usually nice guy Rich Sommer cast as the killer-next-door played by David Morse in the earlier flick. (Disturbia was itself a somewhat tepid, adolescent version of Hitchcock's masterpiece Rear Window.)

But the last 15 minutes of Summer of 84 are as chilling as anything with a PG-13 rating can be. From a rather plodding pace with a lot of moments straight out of a John Hughes film (think geeky teens behind binoculars creaming their jeans for unattainably hot high school girls) to a conclusion that Hitchcock could have authored, this flick undergoes a major personality shift. The turn can be precisely located in the film, beginning with a very slow pan of a darkened hallway in which something quite ordinary-but in this context, absolutely terrifying-descends from the ceiling. From thereon, you are in a much darker movie with the capacity to leave you unsettled even as you come out of the theatre into bright sunlight.

This movie-like the 80s nostalgia-thon Stranger Things-had multiple directors (three, in fact) and I can't help but wonder if one of them was steering the hog for the last 15 minutes who was only riding sidecar for the first hour and a half. There's hardly a chilling moment in that first 90 minutes. But the final confrontation between the killer and the kid is both unexpected in its outcome and damn near perfect filmmaking. Our hero discovers that being charming and uncommonly perceptive when you are just a fifteen-year-old boy going up against a psychopath may not be enough.

Most of the movie is a faded copy of better originals, but let's hope the evil genius who gave us the last fifteen minutes resurfaces for a whole movie soon.

The Circle (I) (2017)

Dave Eggers, what the h#ll happened?

[1/10 · 11 August 2021]

This movie paints itself into a corner--or maybe a circle--and comes up with a bogus utopic solution that I think both Edward Snow and Mark Zukerberg could love. It manufactures a crisis in Act II that is completely unrealistic simply because corporations don't risk having demos blow up in their faces by welcoming in uncontrollable variables and then refuses to accept the natural consequences (including for the corporation) of this colossal FU. And Emma Watson's Girl Friday character can't have a genuine change of heart because then she can't keep her 20 million followers. So, hey, folks, let's just end privacy altogether! That'll fix it, right? There's no logic to this at all, unless you think friendship means being able to stalk people you know 24/7 with or without their permission. How someone of Eggers talent could help construct such a shallow and foolish story is beyond me. I haven't read the book. Maybe Eggers is deluded enough to believe that all we have to do is end the right to privacy and that will somehow save civilization. To which I can only say: go read 1984, you dumb bunny.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

"Why sooo serious?"

[4/10 · 7 June 2020]

Imagine a summer blockbuster with major stars and top level special effects that has no laugh lines at all. Now imagine one that is full of laughable plot devices yet insists on taking itself as seriously as a Marlin Brando in Apocalypse Now. That's this movie. Why did aliens put a device that could wipe them out on the wrist of an abductee they only wanted to experiment on to death? Why are they kidnapping humans and " probing for weakness" if they "don't consider us a threat." Why does the same ship shot for shot look completely different in size and often too small to fit the giant hulking aliens supposedly inside them? Why does the other alien who can resurrect her dead body from a funeral pyre not heal herself much earlier and save Craig the trouble of carrying her Dying body across the desert? And finally why are the aliens who have such advanced technology and stealth capabilities completely mindless in battle? There are no answers to any of these questions. The ever mediocre Favreau doesn't respect his audience enough to care.

Raising Cain (1992)

Make crap.

[2/10 · 17 February 2020]

This movie is a mess. The plot is ridiculous; the sub-plot worse. And the actors seem to be mis-directed into hammy, over the top performances, which includes an oncologist coming on to her dying patient's husband at said dying patient's bedside; it feels like something out of a adult flick. There's also a lot of tin-can sounding voice over of characters' thoughts. Lithgow plays three different characters--the main character, his evil twin, and the father that warped them both with psychological experiments. Watching Lithgow is fun, but it's not enough to save this schlock.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

Seriously, Best Picture?

[5/10 · 26 August 2019]

Magical realism in film is tricky stuff because it's just so damned easy to do on film. Novelists don't have the luxury of special effects, so when they transcend known reality, there has to be something mythic driving the scene to make it work (as in Morrison's Beloved or Allende's House of Spirits). It can work on film too--Pan's Labyrinth--but in this film, it's never clear what all the suspension of gravity is about. Is Keaton's character schizoid? Does he really have strange powers? Why do those powers never actually figure in the plot? The script violates many times Chekov's rule that a gun in the first act better go off in the third, though, of course, a gun does go off over and over again and if you can't guess what will happen the last time it goes off, then you weren't paying attention to the filmmaker's all too telegraphed intentions. The ending is downright bogus--why does the character do what he does and why does the filmmaker choose a magical realist ending? What has the character learned or gained at this point? And, why, seriously, did he try to off himself? Does any actor really try to kill themselves because their career isn't what it used to be--and especially before they find out whether or not the comeback they risked everything for is going to work? I can't think of a single actual Hollywood suicide that was simply a matter of a struggling career (no drugs, no disease, no alcoholism). To sum it up, I just don't buy what's going on in this movie. Keaton overacts as usual. Norton is awesome as is Emma Stone as a bug-eyed recovering addict whose sexy as hell. Naomi Watts has too little to do--oh yes, there's also a lesbian subplot with her that goes nowhere as well. And the jazz drumming soundtrack is annoying. I like jazz drumming; it just doesn't work here because it is always the same tempo and tone, so instead of punctuating changes and dramatic peaks, it becomes a guarantor of a monotonous frenzy. This movie is pretentious rather than profound; novel rather than original; self-congratulatory rather than truly self-examining. So, of course, Hollywood creamed themselves over it and gave it the Oscar. So it goes.

Boston Legal: Green Christmas (2007) Season 4, Episode 10

Argument about Hummers vs Hybrids is BS

[6/10 · 22 July 2019]

It's true. You can't trust those stats they throw around in the BL courtrooms, either for or against your favorite cause. Here's the lowdown on Hummers vs. Hybrids. It's true the manufacturing of Hybrids pollutes more but in the lifetime of a car, a hybrid has a much smaller carbon footprint. The only study that claims otherwise was commissioned by--you guessed it--the auto industry.

House of Cards (2013–2018)

Season 6 Review Only

[2/10 · 9 November 2018]

OK, really it's a review of the first episode because that's as far as I can stand. Apparently, being a woman president is the worst job in the world and nobody respects you--not your staff, not your soldiers, not your donors, not reporters. So one should tell Angela Merkel or even Madelyn Albright and Hilary Clinton. Yes, the lunatic fringe would kick up a fuss for a woman president and Obama did get crap at times--that asshole congressman who yelled "liar" in the S of the Union address--that a white man president wouldn't have had to put up with; but generally speaking, President Hilary Clinton would have been respected and taken seriously and her gender, while subtext, would not be the text of her every day operational conversations--she, unlike Claire Underwood, would have made sure of that. Suddenly, rather than being a modern day Richard III; the show has become a "me too" hand wringing. It's too bad because the writers in their weird combination of guilt and righteousness are trying to erase not just Kevin Spacey but Francis Underwood and the premise that drove the first five seasons from the show. When Claire says in direct address to the camera (to us) that Frank lied to us for five years, we know better because most of what he said to us was operational and we saw his words become reality in the course of the show. So this effort to erase the validity of the character is an act of bad faith on the part of the writers. And as a result, the show now stinks to high heaven. It's too bad because Claire used to be a fascinating character--now she's just a shell for the writers to use as megaphone for PC pronouncements--when they aren't reverting to making her into Lady Macbeth, without the guilt.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Remember when...

[2/10 · 22 July 2018]

We thought the problem with Alien sequels was the lack of Ridley Scott's involvement? Those were the days. Prometheus may have been ponderous and pretentious, but at least there was something there to think about. This film is like a really bad remake of Aliens--all out war with a fetal/adolescent/grown up version of the beasties, but without Cameron's sense of pacing or the deft characterizations, or Ripley's kickass Mama a Mama battle with the queen bitch. Given the extremely short time frames between prequels and the original series, there's no good explanation--other than asses in the seats novelty--for the constant morphing of the creatures, and these new aborted fetuses with fangs are the worse thing since that other human/alien hybrid at the end of the last Alien sequel. Hairless and without a developed exoskeleton they seem strangely resistant to heavy caliber, automatic weapons. This movie wastes thirty-five minutes getting to any sense of tension and yet, in all that time, fails to develop any significant sense of character or conflict. We just wait for the beasties to arrive and the slaughter to begin. If an unimaginative gorefest with creatures you've seen a hundred times is your idea of a good time, this is your flick. Otherwise, not so much. Ridley, whose BR 2049 was similarly structured like a wet noodle, a once great filmmaker, has simply forgotten how to create genuine narrative tension. It reminds me of Lucas in the second trilogy, though Scott has fallen farther, since some of Lucas's flaws were there to be seen all along.

Luke Cage (2016–2018)

Season 1: 9 stars; Season 2: 5 stars--We don't need Marvel does Empire.

[6/10 · 5 July 2018]

The first season was an awesome, politically intelligent, character-driven story that was bingeworthy. The second season has become a knock off of _Empire_--a black soap opera. Even if I did like Empire, which I don't, we don't need a Marvel copy. The money plot-line of Stokes is complicated and dull; Claire's moral hectoring of Luke when there's no ethical compromise in his actions that weren't part of the first season is also dull; Shades has worn out his welcome (no real mystery there once he took off the glasses); and the new villain has nothing going for him except his Jamaican accent. I miss the show that was part Malcolm X, part Spike Lee, and still all Marvel. Too bad.

Backcountry (I) (2014)

This is NOT "The Edge"--it's a lot more terrifying

[5/10 · 3 May 2017]

The main purpose of my review is simple. To warn people that if you're glad that Werner Herzog didn't play the audio tape of the killing of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend in _Grizzly Man_, you may want to think twice about seeing this film. The bear attack is deadly and truly horrifying, and given that it is based on a true story (a couple attacked in Ontario by a predatory black bear), though in real life the woman died and the husband survived, it's hard to tell yourself "it's just a movie." I had to turn it off during the deadly attack--too much horror.

As for the rest of the movie (since I saw over two thirds of it), I can confirm what a number of other reviewers said: that the characterizations are OK, but that both characters do a lot of stupid things that set up their situation--far more than their real life counterparts, whose only mistake was to camp in a relatively remote area of a Canadian provincial park. I live in an area where black bear sightings are not uncommon. Now that I know they can actually become predatory--not merely defensively aggressive--I'm feeling a lot less OK about my next hike. Jeesh!

Intruder (III) (2016)

Dull as dirt

[1/10 · 23 November 2016]

Let me just say that the reviewer from Filmschool dropouts got everything right — including the comparison to the much better _Intruders_, except that he really wasn't harsh enough. This is a godawful, stupid, predictable movie with a fake ending that tries to echo _Saw_'s twist, except that in _Saw_ we actually are given a new perspective through which to see everything and make sense of it all while here we are given exactly what we already knew with a lot of pointless montage and hyped up music. (After the fake ending, there's a real one which isn't any better or more thrilling.) If you can't tell who the killer is the first time you see him, then you're just the sort of clueless idiot the director is hoping will watch this film, because it couldn't possibly interest anyone with half a brain. Why did anyone green light this project and give this kind the money to make a film with pretty decent production values — whose bud, son in law, or nephew is this guy? But I really do blame myself; I should have known from the opening scene how bad this flick is — a woman is murdered with a plastic bag and though she is still alive and kicking for several minutes, it doesn't occur to her to just tear a hole in the plastic right where it is stretched across her gaping mouth. Like I said, stupid. It's too bad because there are some great shots of the incessant Portland rain--nice atmosphere but zero suspense, and zero for original plotting.

13 Cameras (2015)

Not as Bad as a lot of these reviews claim

[6/10 · 16 August 2016]

Apparently, this movie goes by different names. In US release, it is called "Thirteen Cameras," but I'm guessing from some of the other reviews that in international markets (Australia? UK?), it's called "Slumlord." The truth is that the second title fits better. There's some stats at the beginning about thousands of people in the US being watched in their homes every year without their knowledge, but this film isn't really about our voyeuristic society; to claim that it is would be like saying _Silence of the Lambs_ is a commentary on human cannibalism. The Landlord here is just one super duper creepy dude. In another era, he would have drilled holes in the wall and lived next door so he can peek through. The technology just makes it easier and more efficient for him to be what he is. As others have said, Archambault is absolutely terrifying as a the kind of landlord/tenant manager that is very close to one you've had at some point in your life--he shuffles, grumbles, stares, and avoids outright hostility by agreeing to come fix your sink but not at the time you'd like. Except this one is watching you and has fixed up his own special room for you in the basement. It's not clear whether this villain has murder in his plans or only captivity, which makes him a bit more ambiguous than other classic serial killer villains. The climax is weak as no one seems to be able to give this shuffling old man (though one undeniably powerfully built) a good contest. To the girl in the pool, I have only one suggestion--not his throat, which you can't reach with your head under water, but his BALLS!, which are right there in front of you!!! In fact, none of the three principals seems to have much of a will to live. Is this movie the revenge of the propertied working class against the idly upwardly mobile?--the male protagonist has an assistant even though he seems to do no work whatsoever; at least the slumlord fixes the sink and the toilet. Archaumbault's predatory, open-mouthed, wide-eyed staring captures the drug-like trance of the terminal sex addict and will make your skin crawl for real. This movie is dark and, in its last shot, rather flip with flimsy characters and no back story for its sociopath, but it keeps you engaged and delivers some good shocks. (As for those of you who actually were disappointed you didn't see the hammer destroying the skull of that character, to quote Mike in "Stranger Things": "what is wrong with you? what is WRONG with YOU?!")

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Atmospheric, uncanny, but pretentious

[5/10 · 3 January 2016]

Lots of reviewers will tell you about how well acted this is--especially by Ezra Miller as the fatally charismatic yet repellent teenage psychopath--and how cool some of the filmmaking is, but this review is about the film's disassociation from reality, making it more pretentious than insightful.

First, we are supposed to believe that Swinson's character is a successful entrepreneur and a best-selling author. She is a WASP who lives in a great big house and clearly is well educated. And yet in this flick in response to her son's behavior, she does not: a. seek a second opinion when a GP says her son is fine just because he (the GP) couldn't read bad affect if it hit him in the face b. seek psychological counseling for herself or her son c. articulate (remember she IS a writer) to her husband just what her fears and observations are--instead she just puts her head on his knee and stares blankly into space, again and again...

d. do more to protect her young, adorable daughter, whom she clearly loves, from her truly violent son e. move out of town after the disaster and instead remains in the community to suffer face punches, major vandalism of her home, sexual harassment and universal scorn. She ran a travel agency before her son went postal and always wanted to jet off somewhere anyway, but now, she decides to remain when nothing keeps her there. Some will say that she remains as some kind of self-enforced penance, but I'm not buying it.

Whatever the parent/child relationship would look like between a budding psychopath and his cold, rich WASP mom, this ain't it.

Finally, her son exhibits two posts of the classic triangle for the developing psychopath: bed-wetting into late childhood and animal torture. Swinson's mother is "harsh" and inept during his infancy, but she is hardly the torturing abuser that would explain a psychopath. Her "harshness" doesn't equal Columbine. In the nurture vs. nature debate, I don't even think it's close in terms of this kid coming down as a natural born killer. He's bad way before his mother can be bad to him.

And please, enough with the symbolism of blood on her hands: red paint plastered by vandals on the house that she tries to scrub or sand off in scene after scene, self-inflicted "accidental" cuts, dreams of swimming in blood... I almost stopped watching during the first 30 minutes because I kept saying to the screen "I get it--she feels she has blood on her hands, would you just move on to the next plot beat for Chrissake!"

The Iceman (2012)

James Franco Sucked!

[5/10 · 11 August 2015]

This wasn't a bad movie, but once I read about the life of the real Kuklinski, I felt this film was pretty much a whitewash of the man. Vronen presents Kuklinski as brutal to punks and wise guys, but essentially loving toward his wife and family (if a bit distant). In truth, K. regularly savagely beat his wife and once tried to run her over with a car. He also didn't kill just punks in pool halls and scumbag wise guys, he killed random people on the street--sometimes just to test out a method of murder that he was planning to use for a contract hire to make sure it was truly lethal. K. was savagely beaten and tortured by a father who succeeded in killing one of his older children, though never charged, during one such beating. It seems he was killing Daddy over and over again in all those murders. This is largely unexplored by Vronen's oddly two-dimensional portrait--in spite of its unjustified sympathy for the man. But now for the headline. James Franco is listed as one of the headliners in this flick, but he has only a very small part in the film. Nonetheless, he could--and should-- have given the film a very powerful moment. The scene is apparently true and K., who murdered hundreds without compunction, later felt guilty for its depth of psychological sadism. In it, Franco's character--a two bit hood, gangster hanger on--is pleading for his life, praying for it, actually, and K. tells him he will wait, delay his death, so he can see if his prayers will be answered. Franco's character, Marty, prays with a combination of desperation and hopelessness as he is confronted with his own lack of belief in an intervening God, even as he prays to stave off death for as long as he can. Shannon's K. waits impassively for time to pass, for God to fail to show up, so that he can finish the task at hand. Shannon is great in the scene--his combination of patience, cruelty, and implacable power--an embodiment, like Javier Bardem's killer in No Country for Old Men, of doom. But Franco is absolutely horrible in this scene since you don't believe for one second this guy thinks he's about to die. He phones the performance in as if it were his Oscar hosting gig. The camera is on him in a scene that should make you feel intense angst, but absolutely nothing is happening. It's not subtle, it's not intense. It's Franco sprawled out on a couch with his hands folded in prayer and squeezing his eyes tight like he was afraid someone was going to use a squirt gun on them. If you threw a rolled up newspaper at a casting line you'd hit somebody who could have done the scene better. Franco is a wildly inconsistent actor, who can be quite good, but is often awful simply because he's still acting like a spoiled adolescent even though he's now in his mid 30s. Get your act together, man; be professional. If I were Shannon, who delivers a great performance, watching Franco screw the pooch in this scene, I'd be feeling murderous too.

Preservation (2014)

could have been OK, but wasn't

[2/10 · 22 April 2015]

OK, teens as killers who communicate with one another only via text and violence. I can dig that. (One reviewer complains about how the heavy handed "messaging" of having them text when they're sitting right next to each other, but I've seen that happen, so I think that's a fair comment on our techno-generation.) But the character development of the three main protagonists is incredibly weak and the first two kills are ridiculous as protagonists, including a combat-hardened veteran who manages to best an armed and towered sniper with a stick lashed to his hand, decide to turn their backs on their antagonists without verifying that they are actually incapacitated or weaponless. WTF! Also, once we see the size of the teens in question (one of them a wheezing asthmatic), the idea that they could go mano a mano in physical combat as they do with two big strapping grown men (did I mention that one of them is a combat veteran?) is also absurd. If you're gonna make your killers beanpole teens, you'd better give them better strategies for killing grown men who see them coming than hand to hand combat and playing possum, if you want to keep any credibility as a thriller. Too bad, because the movie does have some good scenes--the lead killer almost drowning one of the other killers to make him not run home to mom, his face vibrating with sadistic delight behind his skull face mask, is effectively chilling. A little more thought given to the script and the choreography of the kills could have improved this flick a lot.

Coldwater (2013)

Disturbing, but not satisfying

[6/10 · 17 August 2014]

This film has a political agenda, one I happen to agree with. That is, there's something wrong with juvenile detention facilities that are de facto concentration camps, that have no legal oversight or laws pertaining to them and where many young men have died over the last thirty years and whose only justification for this legal carte blanche is that the parents are the ones "sentencing" their kids there. The torture is certainly disturbing. But unlike one of the reviewers, I don't see much in the way of character development here. And while the young actor--who is the spitting image of Ryan Gosling (he even _acts_ like him)--does a good job; he develops along very predictable lines. The other characters are fundamentally flat, especially the Colonel who remains a cipher throughout the film: we never learn really why he's such an asshole or what he thinks about his own asshole behavior. Character development for him turns out to be drinking more in the film's third act and fondling his pistol with suicidal thoughts. The film ends very disturbingly and certainly leaves a mark, as it were. But the final confrontation between Brad and the Colonel is absolutely wordless and without much depth--a problem with much of the film. I think it won at the film festivals for the disturbing violence yoked to its liberal politics, not for its storytelling.

The Last Stand (2013)

An NRA wet dream, and yet...

[7/10 · 6 June 2014]

OK, when you stop to think about this flick, from the New Mexico Sheriff Arnold telling the feds he doesn't answer to them, to the day being saved by the gun nut who has a barnful of impressive (and totally illegal) firepower, to the old lady who pulls out her shotgun from behind the divan and blows away a bad guy for trespassing through her parlor, this film is one long wet dream for the NRA crowd. If everybody were packin', we could just blow all these bad guys away! Still, this is high octane fun, shot full of adrenalin by its amped up, talented director who knows how to make an action scene that you can actually follow (PLEASE, take note, Michael Bay) and prefers real cars doing spectacular flips to CGI bullshit. Arnold is a bit rusty, as several have commented, but he still knows how to deliver a quip and his bad-ass squint works even better now that his face is as craggy as Eastwood's was when he was, what, 12? The villain is surprisingly engaging, though I couldn't stand Johnny Knoxville as comic relief--I really wish someone would figure out that he really isn't an actor, just a jackass--and Forrest Whitaker is given very little to do, which is always a shame. Not a great film, but then Arnold only made two great films--Terminator I and Terminator II. This one gets the job done.

Doctor Who (1996 TV Movie)

Dr. Who doesn't work when it isn't cheesy...

[2/10 · 31 August 2013]

I'm watching this movie now and I'm so bored I'm writing the review before it's over.

Dr. Who doesn't work when it takes itself seriously, when it limits itself to the realistic expectations of mainstream cinematic storytelling (whatever the genre). This is why the first season of the BBC reboot with Christopher Eccleston didn't work in my opinion. The actor always look annoyed that he wasn't in a Guy Ritchie shoot 'em up flick and the show's producers took their storytelling way too seriously. Eccleston may have been praised for his lock, stock, and two smoking barrels as the Doctor, but clearly the re-creators of the show realized that the Doctor's longevity was due to his and the show's free-ranging eccentricity, which is why subsequent seasons featured doctors with odd, but charming personalities in the tradition of Baker, Noughton, and that Sylvester guy, and plots like the one with David Tennant where he's stranded aboard an orbiting spaceship with the shape and name of the Titanic on Christmas eve--right before it runs into...what? why, the earth, of course! So this movie tries to take its plot seriously even though it doesn't really have a plot and leaves me so bored it was much more fun to write about the show than this movie, which has pretty much been well dissected by all the previous reviews. But, hey, lighten up about the kiss, folks.

Bunnyman (2011)

Just because you meant to do it, doesn't make it good.

[1/10 · 20 July 2013]

OK, the other reviewers--at least the 90% who are sane--did an excellent job of telling you why this movie sucks: characters who are so uninterested in survival their gene line would have been extinguished back in the Paleolithic age, bad splatter gore (the bunny idly picking something red off an obviously fake brain is a sample), and inexplicable plot turns and ancillary nasty characters who have no reason for being save to fill out the way overlong 120 minutes running time. (By the way, the budget must not have been that low if they could afford that much wasted film.) So I won't spend any more time doing that. I'm sure the director/screenwriter, if he bothers to read these reviews, will claim that all this was deliberate: the stupidity of the characters, their utter banality, even their absolute lack of teamwork or genuine concern for one another. But doing everything nonsensically doesn't make your work theatre of the cruelly absurd, and originality without quality has no value at all. As Samuel Johnson once said: "your work is original and good. Unfortunately, the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." Except that there's nothing good here, and little that's really original either. Save yourself some time and frustration: hop right on over Bunnyman to the next horror flick in your queue.